


Adaption

by Calligraphyandwriting



Category: Ben 10 Series, Monster High
Genre: (But with Cousins), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Brother-Sister Relationships, Complicated Relationships, F/F, F/M, Fantastic Racism, High School, LGBTQ Character, M/M, Queer Character, Queer Themes, Romance, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23649508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calligraphyandwriting/pseuds/Calligraphyandwriting
Summary: The Tennysons aren't strangers to difficulty. They've fought Warlords and mercenaries and just plain creeps, on off since they were 10. But when there's an accident in Azmuth's laboratory, the Tennysons find them selves in situation they never been in before: alone. They've fallen through multi-verse to an fun house mirror version of Earth, the land, history and people familiar but twisted and distorted beyond recognition. Not necessarily evil, just different and definitely not welcoming of a pair of teenagers that break the unspoken divides between the human and monsters.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Basically I have a love affair for world building crossovers, the weirder the better. I always felt that the world of Monster High was criminally underdeveloped so this is me playing in Mattel's sandbox using Gwen and Ben Tennyson as my bucket and spade. 
> 
> Oh also there will be Queer characters. Straight characters too, but Ben will have relationships with both male and female characters and I will be shipping Clawdeen and Draculaura. So if you can't deal with that I would strongly suggest you move on. 
> 
> I own neither Monster High or the Ben 10 series. It and any characters that may appear in this story are the intellectual property of Man of Action Studios, Sander and Mattel

Prologue 

Ben Tennyson was no stranger to danger. He’d fought warlords and criminals and prevented an invasion of the Earth before he’d turned 11. Ben was confident in his ability to deal. So, when the floor opened up beneath his feet in Azmuth’s lab he didn’t immediately panic. Screamed yes. Panic, no.  
Portals, in Ben’s experience, had been rare but not unknown. He could survive landing in the null void – probably. But instead of the veiny, tissue dimension of the Null Void, the space they’d fallen into staid a vast white nothingness somehow bleached of both colour and light. Close to blind, Ben reached for his watch, managing to turn only to be batted aside by a heavy overwhelming force, which seemed to squish his entire body under the weight. Ben screamed as electricity coursed beneath his skin, his body going rigid with pain. 

Then, without any indication as to why, the white light surrounding them turned red, then pink, then a dark heavy purple until suddenly they met the ground with a crash, the grounded energy the only mercy to be found on the unforgiving soil. Free from most of the wattage, Ben rolled over, yanking a wire imbedded in his arm out, biting his tongue to keep from screaming again.  
Heaving for breath with a thin layer of blood coating his tongue, Ben came back to himself slowly. Turning his focus first to grey threatening sky above them and then to the clap of thunder which echoed in the distance. Gradually, his field of vision began to widen again, letting him notice the enormous dark red trees with black leaves and pulsating vines, which stretched up high into the sky above. Ben’s brain immediately assumed they’d landed on an alien planet. Inhaling deeply he found the atmosphere breathable, if a little damp. 

“Be-Ben?” Gwen voice cut through the buzz of Ben’s thoughts; her words shakier than they should be. Rolling onto his side again, Ben tried to find his cousin. Their crash landing had left a vaguely smoky crater, with cables, concrete and chunks of monitors imbedded in the enormous trees. As usual, he spots her hair first, a bright spot of orange in the corner of his eye.  
“Here,” Ben groaned back; his voice hoarser than he was expecting. He tries to roll to his feet only for his arm to give in with his nervous system radioing in a rapid (and loud) no-no-no-no.  
“Be-n!” Gwen yelled again, hiccuping back tears. Ben tried again; this time careful to put as little pressure as he could on his left arm. Shaky and far from stable, Ben got to his feet and staggered over to his dweeby cousin. He found her flat out the ground shaking with tears as she tries to shift an enormous piece of rubble off her foot. 

“H-ey, doofus? You okay?” Ben asked with a bravado he didn’t really feel.  
“Oh yeah- I’m, I’m fine, I’m enjoying a pedicure from mole people!” Gwen snarled, blue spheres of light flickering around her fingers as she tries to dislodge her foot. “Why don’t you help and turn into four eyes, doofus; Actually be useful for once,” Gwen ordered, her own attempt at an attitude not very believable either.  
Ben went to do just that, only to hesitate. The face of the Omnitrix had been smashed open, exposed circuitry and missing pieces of metal plainly visible. “I don’t think I should,” he admits, more scared than perhaps he’d ever been. The whole reason they’d travelled to Galvan prime had been to remove the watch. Ben had wanted a break, at least for a few years to be normal. But just as Vilgax couldn’t take it off neither could the Tennysons. So they’d piled into the Rustbucket and gone to Galven Prime, Gwen tagging along mostly for curiosities sake. 

The Omintrix didn’t look very indestructible anymore. Gwen froze and twisted, breath hitching briefly in pain before she opened her eyes again and looked at his wrist with horror.  
“Oh, yeah, that looks…” Gwen paused trying to swallow the fear that was lodged in her throat, “bad,” she finished lamely. 

“Yeah no kidding dweeb,” Ben rolled his eyes. “Why don’t I try shoving it and you try and pull it out?”  
Gwen nodded at which point Ben shoved with all his might. The rock barely moved but it was enough for the redhead to remove her foot from where it was wedged. Shaking again, they both crawled away from the potentially dangerous debris and into open, maybe safer, space. 

“Ow!” Gwen yelped when she hesitantly touched her foot which was now starting to swell.

“Is it broken?” Ben asked cradling his arm.

Gwen shook her head. “I don’t think so, just, painful – you?” She asked motioning to his arm.

“No, just, just really, really sore. I got shocked whilst we were- whilst we were falling.” Ben twitched as his body remembered the feeling of all those volts surging beneath his skin. “Where are we?”

Gwen shook her head and shrugged, as clueless as he was. “I don’t know, those trees, they kinda look like Fir trees, maybe but, I can’t see any stars…” she shook her head, putting aside her confusion in favour of solving her pain. Searching her pockets, she mourned slightly as she pulled out her crushed cell phone and a now slightly charred spell book. Flicking through the pages she found the spell she wanted. To Ben it looked like a page of circular squiggles and triangles, but his cousin seemed to find some sense in it. She pointed at her foot and spoke:

-Matyan demdera Genaga- 

The spell swirled around Gwen’s foot in hazy blue mist, the enormous bruise of broken capillaries and swollen flesh sluggishly repairing itself. After about 2 to 3 minutes, she came to her feet, wincing only slightly when she put her weight on it. “Okay, now your turn.” Gwen said turning to face her cousin, ignoring his frown. “Quit being such a baby, it barely even hurts.” She repeated the spell, though this time she pulled the dirt off the surface. As usual, Gwen’s magic felt weird, like standing in hot spring too long or staring at the sun. But it was a comforting sort of weirdness.

Lightning snapped across the sky, jolting yet another rush of adrenaline in the two teenagers.  
“We, we need to find shelter.” Ben announced looking nervously at the various metal cables that were now slung like vines across the trees – an open invitation for a lightning strike, and Ben did not want to fry again. Once was enough.

Gwen nodded, flipping through her spell book to one of the pages she’d bookmarked earlier in the summer. “Here, if we put together a frame I can fill in in with clay from the soil – make it sturdy enough to keep out the rain.”

Relived to have a reason to mock his cousin, Ben sighed dramatically. “You are such a nerd, why would you even learn that kind of spell dweeb?”

“So if Grandpa’ snoring got bad again, I’d be able to escape - unlike you dofus,” she stuck out her tongue. Picking up a piece of shrapnel, she quickly carved a rounded symbol onto the bark of the tree. “There, now we can find it when we go back.”

Ben nodded and together they trooped into the woods, looking for a decent campsite, Grandpa Max’s teachings rattling in their ears. Eventually they decided to use the exposes roots of a particularly big tree, that had been knocked over by a storm at some point. Soil, rain and time had already formed the beginnings of a shelter between the exposed roots. Clearing what little life lived there - mostly bugs which Ben felt no guilt over evicting, Gwen’s magic hardened the roots and filled in the gaps, making a small, mostly rainproof room. Damp and more than a little cold, they huddled unhappily before a fire they’d hastily made at the mouth of their shelter, watching the flames carefully until exhaustion finally pulled them under.


	2. Chapter 1: Isolation

It took them about 2 weeks of waiting to realise that they weren’t going to be found. It took two months for them to realise why. Alternate universes, like portals weren’t a complete unknown to either Tennyson’s. Gwen knew it from her physics classes, and Ben from his own brief, maybe real, maybe not, experience of a universe where Gwen had picked up the watch first, not him. The trees didn’t just look like fir trees, they were fir trees. Only here, they grew bigger with black needles instead of green. After a ritual or two, they’d pinpointed their location to Northern Oregon, near the coast and about 5 hours outside of Portland, which didn’t exist here. Instead, a city called New Salem sat, a confusing contradiction of a metropolis that Ben and Gwen had ever seen. T

his earth, unlike their own, knew other sentient life existed, beside homo sapiens. Except instead of beings from other planets, they had monsters, a catch-all term to refer to quite possibly hundreds of thousands of non-human species the ranged from the magical to the chemically altered and the undead. Walking into the city for the first time though, Ben found that the relationship between the two societies were ugly. The city split firmly down the middle with the humans on one side, and monsters on the other. Walking into the monster zone had seen him rapidly shooed back across the invisible boarder by a crotchety and unsympathetic old cat-lady with grey fur and whiskers. Trying to talk to the humans almost proved deadly. 

Ben had only meant to ask the cop for help. Ben had always been taught to trust cops. Maybe he didn’t always go to them for help, since his criminals were usually of the alien variety, but he can still recall the Bellwood sheriff talking at his middle school assembly, and officer Ramirez introducing his class to her K-9 partner. Having a uniformed officer, who Ben had been raised to trust turn on him with a gun had shocked him to his core. He’d ran rather than fight, but something ugly had burnt up in his chest as he retreated back into the forest. The slurs the cop had thrown hadn’t made much sense to him, but Ben didn’t need to know what bolt-backer was to know what ‘rape seed’ implied. 

Their second attempt was more subtle and more paranoid in equal portions. Unlike Ben, Gwen’s powers were invisible. With an illusion to clean up her clothes and darken her eyes to a more hazel green, Gwen had walked straight into the library with barely a glance from the bored security guard sitting in the entrance booth. When the librarian had tried to make small talk with her, Gwen had passed herself off as an out-of-towner entertaining herself whilst her grandpa’s RV was repaired. Once there, she dug into the city’s history and extrapolated from there, the country’s.

What she found did nothing to dim growing fear Gwen felt over the world they’d landed in.  
The human’s in this world were even more intolerant of the unusual than those of their own earth. Racial conflict was a messy and complicated subject – largely because the (human) European colonisers had never really ‘won’ the west the way they had on their earth. In a world of magic and monsters, the slaves and other oppressed people of the America’s had better tools to fight and defend themselves. Without a consistent slave trade to bolster its wealth and population, America had never pursued independence from Britain, and as such had never expanded to cover the continent. More than that, the witch hunts which had dominated 17th century Europe had never really left this land, replaced by the Hallow trials, where Queer humans were the most frequent scapegoats, and though the trials had declined according to the records Gwen found, it was easy to guess that such violence was still close at hand.

It could be worse, Gwen tried to rationalise. The Humans and monsters weren’t actively at war with each other anymore. No matter how horrendous the history, America had been a relative state of peace for nearly 3 centuries now, 4 in the western regions and 5 in Mexico and Texas (which had remained Mexican). The invisible boarders which Ben had been pushed across were a common solution for regions where sentients congregated for resources or as part of messier histories. Ben, with a little help from Gwen in the form of illusion pendant to turn his skin green, had found that the monster communities whilst consistently anti-human, were fairly divided internally - particularly along species and cultural lines. Getting better, but still not great according to the message board Ben had found for hybrid monsters and the newspapers he taken from corner shops in the monster residential neighbourhoods. 

Given all the information they’d dug up, Gwen decided that all that they could do was work as hard as they could to get home as quickly as they could. They had no idea what the time differences were between the two universes and it was clear that they weren’t likely to be safe in either of the community.  
Ben couldn’t fault the logic, even as he grew increasingly lonely and bored. He loved his cousin, and they’d grown up enough that they weren’t at each other’s throats they’d been at 10 but Gwen was still Gwen. She liked magic and history and finicky translations not soccer and super sumo wrestler. Neither of them liked being banished to the forest like some kind of fairy tale monster, but Gwen was better equipped to time alone than Ben was. To that end he turned his attention to fixing the watch and getting his full transformations back. 

Not being a Galven genius this proved a largely hopeless effort at first. But across the winter, when the worst snows flew in and they were trapped in the Roots to stay warm, Ben had slowly come to a solution. Full transformations were out. The changes his body had to undergo when transforming were too drastic to be safe without Omnitrix to help. But the transformation aspect was only half of what the watch was. Azmuth had made the Omnitrix to be an archive of every sentient species in the galaxy. The genetic information stored in it far outstripped the measly 22 aliens Ben was used to changing into. But enough of that alien DNA had bleed into Ben’s over the years that with a little focus, Ben found he could magnify a trait or two from his line-up. 

Unsurprisingly his favourite aliens came the easiest – Heatblast, Four arms, Wild mutt and XLR8 specifically. Others, like Diamondhead, Ripjaw and Blitxwolfer were harder, the changes difficult to make and harder to keep up. Some Ben didn’t even try risking, like Waybig, Grey Matter and Stinkfly. He guessed that anything that changed his mass or skeletal structure that much would probably be too dangerous to mess around with. Ben’s working theory was that a combination of familiarity and genetic resonance allowed it to work. Gwen, every bit as curious as Ben was, but more likely to try and establish scientific rules than Ben was, wasn’t convinced by his theory. She suggested that he was using magic to change his body, but Ben pretended not to hear her. He preferred his own theory.

It was an infinitely more complicated way to use his powers than the watch was but given the choice of being powerless on a hostile world and not, even someone as lazy as Ben knew he had to push himself. Their survival could depend on it. Which it did – sort of.

Pitchwood forest was not the safe, heavily monitored national parks Granpa Max had sometimes insisted they visit. Beasts the size of small cars and bugs size of house cats lived in it, and carnivorous plants littered forest floor. There were other, more normal animals there too, but when you were competing with bears that didn’t hibernate and coyotes that could turn invisible you needed every advantage you could have if you actually wanted to keep the stag you killed. That the other predators saw them as competition and not additional food sources, which was pretty much their only other advantage. With the fruit from Gwen’s spells and the occasional hunt, they were fairly secure in eating. But there were days where Ben craved a chilly cheese fries something fierce. Once this was over Ben was never going to take his food for granted again. But even with that security there was a lot of stuff they couldn’t make or catch themselves. Things likes clothes and underwear had to be stolen from washing lines; They took knives, shoes and disinfectants from the campsites. They’d survived alone of this planet but they’d come out of it skinner and were desperate leave. This was why today Gwen was taking an enormous risk and raiding the werewolf camp, whilst they were there.

She’d found a ritual which come the autumn equinox could get them home. But she needed two things – the first was star dust which was a bitch to collect but not beyond Gwen. The second thing was silver knives. Using a dowsing spell, she knew that in the third mini-van, near the wolves with dark brown fur, there was a set of knives with a high enough percentage of silver for their needs. They’d need to purify it somewhat but Heatblast would take care of that tidily.   
Determined the families had reached the most chaotic portion of their arrival, and therefore the moment they were most distracted, Gwen focused in a box of sharp utensils and cast, summoning the metal tin which dropped into her arms with a quiet clank.

________________________________________________________________________

Clawd was bored out of his skull. When he was cub, the Running had been a tonne of fun, even better than yule in a lot of ways. A yearly get together with the other packs during Imbolcto celebrate, go hunting, eat good food and play awesome games. The pups were usually left to run feral during the day, games and mock hunts lasting for hours. However, this year his usual friends were missing, off doing some kind of Crescent Moon freshmen thing, that Clawd - by virtue of attending Monster High - was not invited to. As such, he was the only teenager amongst a bunch of boring, loud puppies, which his parents were totally not sympathetic enough about. Instead Dad was fussing over missing sausages, which he probably just left in the fridge and Mom was off politicking with the other pack representatives. 

Angry and feeling more than a little rejected, Clawd eventually gave up on playing with his sisters and wandered off into the forest with his casket ball planning on practicing for the try outs somehow, only to freeze when for a brief moment his nose caught the scent of his Dad’s sausages coming from the west. Clawd was no Howleen, but his sense of smell was good enough that when he focused, really focused, he could just about smell the garlic-pepper Dad stuffed his hot dogs with. 

Bored and more than a little curious, Clawd decided not to call for his pack and instead decided to track down the thief himself. Let the others see what a Wolf was capable of. 

Remembering his grandma’s lessons, Clawd catalogued ever he scent he could find and then quickly discarded all the scents irrelevant to his prey. Earth, corpse vine and Bloodleaf were the most common scents. Narrowing his sense of smell further, he picked out the territory markers of the forest’s bigger beasts and the smaller prey animals that were denned around them. The most permissive scents acknowledged, Clawd began to slowly stalk towards the garlic-pepper-pork scent he was tracking. As he got closer, he could just about pick out the smell of cotton, old detergent and… parchment?

Clawd pushed aside his confusion for a moment and homed in on the scent, following it for nearly a mile, slowing down further when his ears were able to pick out the sound of knives clinking against each other. Careful to keep downwind in case his prey had a sensitive nose as well, Clawd approached, excitement and nervousness tumbling around in his belly. 

“… took you…. Forever…..”  
“….some……strength…dweeb”   
“Idiot… followed?”

Clawd froze even as he finally spotted the thief – or thieves more accurately. Two normie kids, standing in a wrecked clearing where various machines had been frankensteined together into fallen tree trunks, connected by wires that stretched between branches. It was the kind of set up Clawd would normally be comfortable calling a mad science lab. Clearly self-built, with little common sense or reason. Except, Lab’s were generally built inside, somewhere dark and a little damp. Mad scientists hadn’t the outdoors, to many variables they couldn’t control. 

Peering out from behind the dark oak Clawd stepped forward for a better look. They were both small, probably only about 5’1 and furless. The girl, who was carrying his Dad’s sausages, had short bright red hair with bandages wrapped tight around her wrists and palms. The boy, sitting on a car engine, had shaggy brown hair and a weird hand, with strips of metal growing in the flesh of his wrist and arm, a fractured green dial at its centre. They both wore clothes way too big for them, tied up with either bandages or belts, with ratty sneakers. 

Two sets of pretty, but very hostile toxic-green eyes were focused on him, the girl’s fist was clenched at her chest with a sphere of blue light circling it. The boy was tense, his muscle nearly doubling in size on his skinny frame whilst the green in his eyes gradually retreated under a solid yellow film. Definitely not regular normies. Oh this might hurt. This might hurt a lot.

“Wait!” Clawd yelled when he saw the girl bring her hand backwards, as if to fling the magic she’d summoned, at him. Clawd rolled to his feet, his ears instinctively lying flat with embarrassment and nervousness at aggression poisoning the air. “I’m not, I don’t want to hurt you?” He tried, not entirely sure he should be doing. Looking back, he could see that this whole expedition had been a stupid move.   
“Like you could!” The boy puffed up, clearly insulted. His sister stayed watchful, less moved by her brother’s bravado.

“That’s great!” Clawd replied. “I’m, ugh, I’m Clawd,” he tried, “Who are you?”  
The boy blinked, and for a moment Clawd was scared he would fight him after all, only to relax ever so slightly when his muscles began deflating, though his eyes stayed resolutely yellow. “I’m-“  
“None of your business.” The girl interrupted, giving her brother a firm look which he bristled at. He paused for a moment and looked Clawd over. For his part Clawd tried to look as unthreatening as possible – normies scared easily on their own, didn’t they?

The boy’s aggression receded further and instead of listening to his sister’s warning he rolled his eyes and turned to face Clawd fully. “I’m Ben – this is my cousin Gwen.” At her betrayed look he rolled his eyes. “He’s like our age, and on his own. I think we’re okay, dweeb.” 

“No, we’re not! He knows where our camp is, and if he followed us here no doubt his family can too!” She hissed.

“They probably won’t, the scent trail was pretty weak,” Clawd offered, his own nervousness retreating with the boy – Ben’s - friendliness. “And, well I can keep a secret? If you aren’t hurting the packs that is,” Clawd shrugged, deciding honestly was probably his best policy here. Now that things were a little calmer, the cousins didn’t seem the type to fight for the sake of fighting, just defending their territory.   
Gwen gave him a searching look and with more than a little relief visible in her eyes dispelled her magic. Clawd was confident she was just scared now, which Clawd could guess why. He’d heard how bad things could get for part humans in the eastern states, which given their accents was probably where they were from. 

“Sorry for stealing them, I would have left them if I could but...” This time Gwen confessed, clearly embarrassed. Clawd decided not to ask why they needed his Dad’s sausages given how skinny the pair were.

“Is that a basketball?” Ben interrupted them excitedly, staring hungrily at the ball tucked under his arm. 

“No, it’s ugh, a casket ball, it’s a little heavier than the Normie ones… oh! Do you play?” He asked excited about a possible playmate. 

“I’m more into soccer,” Ben grinned. “But I’d love to play, Gwen’s pretty good too.”

Gwen shrugged again, this time biting her lip with what Clawd was fairly certain was longing. “Do you want to play?” He offered. She frowned, more puzzled than angry.

“How can you play here?” Gesturing to the expansive forest and make-shift lab they were stood in. “It’s not like we have a net.”

“Well no, but drills are pretty fun and, and we could play pass-up!” seeing the looks of confusion and interest in the not-normies eyes Clawd pushed. “Okay, so basically you play by seeing how many times you can pass without hitting an obstacle – like a tree or another player. It’s really good for building team awareness and ball skills!”

“I guess, we could play for little while,” Gwen replied slowly, clearly very tempted. Her eyes went hard again. “But only if you swear not to tell anyone you found us here.”

“I swear,” Clawd immediately offered up, holding up his casket ball. “Wanna try?” For the first time, Gwen relaxed completely and smiled, which suddenly made Clawd very glad that his fur meant he couldn’t blush. Her eyes really were very pretty. Shaking off the thought Clawd threw the ball to Ben caught it with brief huff and then a grin of his own.

They played till sundown that night, talking and showing off in between, only stopping when Clawd heard his Mother’s howl. He left with a promise to return the next day and excited to have two new friends. He knew their story didn’t really add up, but he knew enough that whatever had landed them here, couldn’t have been good. So, he let it be and taught them casketball, introducing them to his favourite musicians and generally fanging out with them till sundown most days, snubbing Romulus and his pack, just as they’d snubbed him.

As one week turned into two and then into three, Clawd’s curiosity grew as learned more about his new friends. Clawd didn’t know a tonne about magic, but Gwen was clearly pretty powerful. Watching her pull stardust from the air had been one of the coolest things he ever seen. Ben on the other hand was clearly some kind of shapeshifter, although he’d never heard of any species which borrowed forms like Ben did. It was a little confusing since they both still looked pretty human, by Clawd’s standards. 

When pushing got him no answers Clawd decided to forgo more questions and settled for helping where he could. Before he left he gave them his old cell phone, pretending to lose it in the forest and a couple of sealed containers Gwen could use for her spells.

The Tennyson’s were still on their own, still missing school and feeding themselves but neither one was willing to talk to the cops of either race. Ben’s explanation of what had happened last time did explain it but he still worried. According to Gwen by the time Autumn rolled around again they might be able to go live with their Grandpa. The stories they’d shared about him were wild and Clawd suspected that he was the source of the cousins magic. Generation skipping was definitely a thing in with magical species as was proving themselves. So he shut up about his being a cop and instead focused on getting them to memorise his number and texting him every day. It wasn’t as if they had much of an excuse. Not to mention, Clawd just liked talking to them. 

Ben was hilarious and wicked smart – he could imagine Ben and Deuce getting on like a house on fire, trading puns and jokes with ease. Gwen was, well. Clawd was honest enough with himself to know that he was definitely crushing hard on the ghoul. If her cousin was smart, Gwen was the kind of concentrated brilliant that Clawd couldn’t help but flush over a little. And the less Clawd thought about what it was like to watch her hunt, the better. Clawd was beyond grateful that Ben’s base form didn’t let him smell Clawd the way another Were might. 

With it being the summer holiday, even with the Running over, Clawd came up to visit a fair bit, even managing to lure the cautious pair into New Salem for a couple of nights. Only Ben had let himself be seen, and even then, only in one of his more dramatic transformations. But it had still been a fangtastic weekend, where his suspicions about his beast friend and his newest friends had proven true and the cousins got a real chance to relax for once. He’d shown the pair the Maul, and city hall and had mostly convinced them that the monsters of New Salem were good people. So when the cousins had called and told him they were leaving that night, Clawd had been genuinely upset. Happy for them but upset all the same. All he could do though was hope they stayed in touch.


	3. Chapter 2: Impact

They were putting down the final pieces of Gwen’s spell and despite how excited his cousin was, Ben couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a mistake. But Gwen was certain, and Ben really wanted to return to civilisation. As great as their camp had become it was still a camp. He wanted running water and mattresses again. He also wanted his parents, his home and high school. He wanted his normality back.

So he swallowed his concerns and did what he was told. He copied out the circle diagram Gwen using the chalk he’d painstakingly dug up from the old quarry, brushing aside the pieces that crumbled off. He’d reburied the fire and shut down the generator he’d bullied into working. He sent a text to Clawd, aware that if this all worked, he’d probably never see his werewolf friend again and felt pretty sad about it. Ben had never really had a best friend before, he wasn’t a loner or anything, but he’d mostly just had friends he liked to hang out with – nobody that got him, or tried to get him, the way Clawd did. Gwen was going to miss him too, however much Gwen wanted to pretend otherwise. Ben wasn’t an idiot and he knew his cousin had started crushing on their friend pretty hard. But weighed up against going home and being with their family again, Ben knew that as unfair as it was, Clawd couldn’t compare.

“Okay, we’re ready,” Gwen announced, abruptly waking Ben from his thoughts. “You stand over there, I’ll start casting – once I’ve found Earth I’ll open the portal properly and we’ll jump through, got it?” 

Ben shrugged, obediently moving backwards, then pausing for a moment. “Gwen, what are we gonna do if this doesn’t work?” 

Gwen smile died. “Don’t even say that. It’s going to work,” she told him, ignoring him in favour of reading over the incantation one last time.

“But what if it doesn’t? You’ve never done magic on this scale before and…”

“And what Ben? What else am I supposed to do. We can’t stay here! It’s not our world and we’re certainly aren’t welcome here.”

“Clawd’s family would help us,” Ben responded seriously. 

Gwen faltered, looking away - Ben was almost never this serious. “We can’t give up, we just, we can’t.” 

“Okay.” 

Gwen shook her head and breathed in deeply, clearing her mind of everything except for the spell. Then she raised her hands and began to chant, feeling rather than seeing when the spellwork brought their circle to life, the feedback tick-tick-tick of the universe filling her minds eye. Gwen stepped forward and brushed her fingers against the veil, that separated every living world from the truly dead. Then she reached out and pushed.

Gwen lost herself for a moment. The overwhelming power of the beyond bleeding through, stripping every aspect of sensation from her, living her only a feather-thin anchor to herself. Gwen didn’t feel time pass or hear her cousin shouting. She absorbed herself utterly in watching every dimension in existence, her very being dedicated to finding home. 

She never heard Ben leave.

\------------------------------------------------

Clawd had been moping all evening. He knew it, his parents knew it, even his sisters had noticed. His brothers hadn’t but they were 3 and could be excused. The best friend he’d ever made and the his first proper crush were leaving tonight, he was allowed to be sad about it. Now if his sister would just stop bugging him about it. Mom got it, even Dad did. Neither of them pushed to hear why, just left him be. But Clawdia was like a dog with a bone and refused to let it go. He’d been a moment away from throwing his meatloaf in her face when he heard something on the edge of his hearing, Clawdine, having the best ears in the house heard it better.

“Mom, some boys yelling for Clawd.” His younger sister announced, sounding concerned. “He don’t sound too good either.”

“Doesn’t,” Dad corrected out of habit, an English teacher to his core. “Stay at the table, Remus don’t hide your vegetables.” Clawd ignored his Dad and ducked past his Mom to follow him. 

“CLAWD!” This time, with the door open, Clawd heard the shout clearly, nearly jumping out of his skin in shock.

“Ben?!” Clawd had never heard his shape shifting friend so loud or so scared before. Clawd tried to rush past his Dad only to be yanked backward by the iron grip on his collar. “Dad! Let me go!”

But his father was unmoved planting himself in front of his son until the source of the screaming zipped on to his lawn. The cousins clothes had never been neat or well fitting, but they’d always scrupulously clean. This time, Ben looked like he’d gotten into a wrestling match with a mud troll. He was soaked in dirt, reeking of fear and wild eyed, his limbs shifting between jet black and soft peach every time he breathed.

“Get your Mom,” Dad whispered, shoving Clawd back, “You can explain later.” Clawd rushed back inside, intent on getting his Mom as quickly as possible. 

BREAK-BREAK-BREAK-BREAK-BREAK   
His son dealt with, Lawrence turned his focus to the possible threat standing on his lawn. In ordinary circumstances, Lawrence would never think of a teenager as threat, but the boy was clearly not in his right mind, and the claws that kept extending and retracting looked sharp. “You all right kid? Do you need some help?” He asked keeping his voice as soothing as possible, wishing it had been Lupe that had gone to the door. His wife was the police officer, and was far better at deselection tactics than he was. As a teacher he had some training, but most of it was geared to dealing with kids with special needs. The principles were the same though, keep calm, try and work out what was needed and kept extra stressors at bay.

The boy nodded rapidly, still looking for Clawd, but thankfully willing to accept Lawrence’s presence. “We need help, Gwen, she, she can’t hear me and there were these things, hands, reaching for her and-and,” the boy started to hyperventilate, a panic attack definitely building.

“Hey,Ben, right?” Lawrence inched closer, grabbing the stressed boy’s attention. “Look at me, focus on me, alright? My names Lawrence, I’m Clawd’s Dad. Are you hurt?” Lawrence asked, he hadn’t seen any open wounds when he’d looked earlier, but he didn’t like the way the boys legs were shaking under dirt crusted khakis. He caught sight of his wife in the corner of his eye, her icoffin gripped tight in her hand. 

Ben shook his head. “I’m, I’m fine, my cousin-“the anxiety in his voice rose again, his head twisting back up the street. Lawrence made soothing sounds, coming closer; still out of reach if he needed to, but close enough to grab him if he collapsed. 

“Okay, Ben? My wife, Clawd’s mom, she’s police office. Now I’m pretty sure she wants to call an ambulance, to come help you. If you want, we can get one for your cousin as well, that sound good?”

Ben nodded again, his breathing starting to calm slightly, his muscles shifting less and less to black, staying a very distinctly human shade of peach. Lawrence looked up to his wife who was already on the phone muttering their address quietly. Taking a risk, Lawrence slowly put his arms around the teen’s bony shoulders. Ben flinched for a moment before calming and leaning into the tactile support. 

Clawd was back on the porch, watching his friend anxiously. Ben, upon spotting him, immediately lurched towards him, clearly close to tears, a familiar face in a sea of strangers. Clawd reacted like any wolf confronted with a stressed packmate and pulled him in to an enormous hug. His wife gestured to the car with a nod. “They want us to bring him to the hospital, they’ll send the ambulance to Pitchwood.” Lawrence nodded and began to slowly guide the distraught teen towards the car.

\------------------------------------------------------

Trekking through Pitchwood forest had never been a task for the faint of heart, but in the dark, with only the moon and fey-fire to light their way, Pitchwood was more dangerous than usual. As such, when the call had come in about a hurt youngling deep in the ancient wood, rather than expecting the ambulance to return to the hospital with the patient, they’d sent the doctor and team out instead. It wasn't an unsual procedure per say. Manon had lost count of the number of gaes bound fae and drained elementals she’d been sent to treat in the field. After all, sometimes hospitals weren’t the best places to treat patients, depending on the conditions of the species. 

Usually though, Manon wasn’t sent out blind with only the knowelge that her patient was female and magical, and quite possibly human. An unusual combination of factors Manon wasn’t thrilled about treating. Her knowledge of human anatomy was passable, as a number of her patients still remained physiologically human even after their deaths. But that was a rather important caveat. She had no idea how life would affect treatment. Not to mention, given her cousins clear mutations, there was every chance his cousin wasn't standard human either. They’d sent out a request to the Witches Council for assistance, but they had no idea how prompt that body was going to be – practitioners of magic were not well known for their reliability. 

The hospital had also specifically sent Manon rather than one of her colleagues on the off chance the magic the patients cousin spoke of was just a misunderstood consequence of the girl’s transition into ghosthood. Being a phantom, she was better positioned than most to treat her in either state. But that was neither here nor there, Manon needed to focus on following the talisman they’d been given and finding her patient. About 20 minutes into their hike, the talisman proved unnecessary, or at least less vital, because after crossing some invisible boundary the forest lit up with fluctuating pink light so bright it was almost blinding. 

“So definitely magic,” Mylla whistled, 4 of her eyes slammed shut to manage the abrupt change in light levels. Manon winced on her assistant’s behalf. That amount light could not be kind for an arachnid.

“Yeah no kidding,” Manon sighed, the spots in her eyes fading enough to continue walking on. Less than five minutes later they came to a small clearing with what looked like the bones of a once fairly complex camp. Manon was impressed to notice that the kids had built a water filtration unit and what was probably a bath in the eastern corner of the camp.

Then she turned her full attention to her patient, who sitting in the middle of the air above a complex spell-frame with zero indication that she’d seen them or cared that they were there. 

“Right evaluation first,” Manon kept her voice low, fairly confident that their patient wasn’t listening, but it was better safe than sorry. “Tony?”

The vampire paused for a moment, his ears twitching slightly. “Heart beats low, 66, 67 but steady,” her paramedic noted. 

“I wouldn’t count on that, those eyes say ghostling to me.” Mylla observed, her eyes tracking over the various cuts across her body, where instead of blood light burst through, the skin around it a darker more purplish shade than the rest of her skin. 

Under the moon, Manon could just about pick out that vibrant red of her natural hair and separate it from the pink slowly engulfing it. If Mylla was right and the teenager was under transition or was even being possessed by an energy being, there was every chance they’d be dealing with a completely different being by the end of the night. 

“Except she definitely still has a heartbeat and a cardiovascular system,” Tony challenged, then pausing again and this leaning back in surprise. “Although I can’t smell any blood, which is... strange.”

“So? Their body’s changing,” Mylla shrugged, confused by the vampire insistence on the point.

“Yeah except cardiovascular is always the first to go in ghosts. No blood makes the whole system inefficient. She could be transitioning into somthing else; maybe fae? Becoming an adult's a pretty traumatic experience for them...”

“I’m going to try and get her attention,” Manon interrupted, received enough information ito inform her initial diagnosis. “Gwen? I’m Dr Du Bois. Can you hear me?” She asked, extremely loud in comparison with the forced quiet of before.

She received no response, but Manon wasn’t expecting to. Tony and Mylla both saw a being in flux. But Manon, who’d been created in a sanitarium as the manifestation of one woman’s determination to meet what she thought the world demanded of her, saw a hurt teenager in the middle of a break down. 

“Your cousin sent me,” she tried. This time she did move, only slightly from the middle distance she'd been staring into, but it was undeniably a response which meant Gwen could heard her. “He’s pretty worried about you, he’s alright, but he needed a little help. His friend took New Salem hospital at the moment.” No outward response again, but the light flickered from pink to purple for a moment. “He said you were trying to go home?” This time, slightly more engaged Gwen nodded. She was still staring firmly out, watching something Manon couldn’t see, but it was good first step. 

“Where’s home then?” Manon asked having walked around the spell-frame to stand the teenager could easily see her. 

There was silence for a moment and Manon started debating what change of tact she should try when the girl’s head suddenly lifted, and she pointed. “There,” she said pointing plainly, as she spoke an image of a suburban town flickered to life in front of them. It looked like any other human settlement in middle Americas that Manon had ever seen, except, despite the detailed 360° view of the city , she couldn’t spot a monster district. Every city in America had one, some more inhabited than others, as part of the Cooperation treaty of 1849. Any settlement that excluded either monsters or humans was subject to vicious and unfaltering economic repercussions and tariffs.

“We aren’t supposed to be here,” Gwen continued her voice devoid of emotion and therefore full of anguish. “It was an accident. This was supposed to work. Get us home. I had to find them first, the spell. I had to anchor it, but Mom, my Mom she doesn’t want to remember me.” Gwen voice caught in her throat. 

There were no tears in her eyes, whatever magic she was channelling preventing them. “She doesn’t want to remember me. She left Dad, won’t talk about me. She told Ken that I, that I, that I,” she stuttered out, her breath starting to rise quick and sharp.

Manon closed her eyes, sympathetic grief swirling in her heart. If she and her cousin had come from purely human and been thrown out, rejected from their family… It would make sense. The boy, Ben, showed clear signs of experimentation, his shape shifting painful rather than fluid. Dr Stein had spoken of genetic manipulation and a limiter embedded in his arms in debrief she’d given them before the emergency team had departed. The notes from the family who’d brought her cousin in said they’d been living in the forest for just under a year since arriving in the North East. According to them, their son - the teens friend – had tried a dozen times to get them to talk to someone, human or monster, but they’d been unwilling. The lack of trust for in either community could definitely come about from such circumstances.

“I’m so sorry,” there was nothing more Manon could do for that except offer the poor girl some sympathy and kindness. Gwen seemed to sense this and with one shuddering sob, dropped from the sky, her circle dissolving around her. Manon lurched forward to catch the falling, fragile girl in her arms as she sobbed.


End file.
